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This article needs additional citations for verification. This article possibly contains original research. The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre was the murder of seven members and associates of Chicago’s North Side Gang that occurred on Saint Valentine’s Day 1929. Saint Valentine’s Day, Thursday, February 14, 1929, seven men were murdered at the garage at 2122 North Clark Street, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago’s North Side. The victims included five members of George “Bugs” Moran’s North Side Gang. Chicago police officers arrived at the scene to find that victim Frank Gusenberg was still alive, despite having sustained 14 bullet wounds. He was taken to the hospital, where doctors stabilized him for a short time and police tried to question him.

When the police asked him who did it, he reportedly replied, “No one shot me. The massacre was an attempt to eliminate Bugs Moran, head of the North Side Gang. Al Capone, who was at his Florida home at the time, was widely assumed to have been responsible for ordering the massacre. Hymie Weiss and Vincent Drucci, had been killed in the violence that followed the murder of their original leader, Dean O’Banion. Several factors contributed to the timing of the plan to kill Moran. Moran and Capone had been vying for control of the lucrative Chicago bootlegging trade. Moran had also been muscling in on a Capone-run dog track in the Chicago suburbs, and he had taken over several saloons that were run by Capone, insisting that they were in his territory.

The plan was to lure Moran to the SMC Cartage warehouse on North Clark Street on February 14, 1929, to kill him and perhaps two or three of his lieutenants. It is usually assumed that the North Siders were lured to the garage with the promise of a stolen, cut-rate shipment of whiskey, supplied by Detroit’s Purple Gang, which was associated with Capone. All of the victims were dressed in their best clothes, with the exception of John May, as was customary for the North Siders and other gangsters at the time. The victims were lined up against this wall and shot. Most of the Moran gang arrived at the warehouse by approximately 10:30 a.

Moran was not there, having left his Parkway Hotel apartment late. He and fellow gang member Ted Newberry were approaching the rear of the warehouse from a side street when they saw a police car nearing the building. They immediately turned and retraced their steps, going to a nearby coffee shop. They encountered gang member Henry Gusenberg on the street and warned him, so he too turned back. Capone’s lookouts likely mistook one of Moran’s men, probably Albert Weinshank, who was the same height and build, for Moran himself. Witnesses outside the garage saw a Cadillac sedan pull up to a stop in front of the garage.

Four men emerged and walked inside, two of them dressed in police uniform. The two fake police officers carried shotguns and entered the rear portion of the garage, where they found members of Moran’s gang and associates Reinhart Schwimmer and John May, who was fixing one of the trucks. To give the appearance that everything was under control, the men in street clothes came out with their hands up, prodded by the two uniformed policemen. Inside the garage, the only survivors in the warehouse were May’s dog “Highball” and Frank Gusenberg, despite 14 bullet wounds. He was still conscious, but he died three hours later, refusing to identify the killers.

The Valentine’s Day Massacre set off a public outcry which posed a problem for all mob bosses. Within days, Capone received a summons to testify before a Chicago grand jury on charges of federal Prohibition violations, but he said he was too unwell to attend. It was common knowledge that Moran was hijacking Capone’s Detroit-based liquor shipments, and police focused their attention on Detroit’s predominantly Jewish Purple Gang. Orvidson had taken in three men as roomers ten days before the massacre, and their rooming houses were directly across the street from the North Clark Street garage.

On February 22, police were called to the scene of a garage fire on Wood Street where they found a 1927 Cadillac sedan disassembled and partially burned, and determined that the killers had used the car. They traced the engine number to a Michigan Avenue dealer who had sold the car to a James Morton of Los Angeles. The garage had been rented by a man calling himself Frank Rogers, who gave his address as 1859 West North Avenue. Police could not turn up any information about persons named James Morton or Frank Rogers, but they had a definite lead on one of the killers. Just minutes before the killings, a truck driver named Elmer Lewis had turned a corner a block away from 2122 North Clark and sideswiped a police car. He told police that he stopped immediately but was waved away by the uniformed driver, who was missing a front tooth. Capone murdered Scalise, Anselmi, and Joseph “Hop Toad” Giunta in May 1929 after he learned about their plan to kill him.

The case stagnated until December 14, 1929, when the Berrien County, Michigan Sheriff’s Department raided the St. 320,000 in bonds recently stolen from a Wisconsin bank, two Thompson submachine guns, pistols, two shotguns, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Joseph authorities immediately notified the Chicago police, who requested both machine guns. Burke was captured over a year later on a Missouri farm.